Sermon Proper C 16: Blessed Assurance

Many of you who teach or who are students find your selves back in the classroom again.  This week the kids in our Montessori school are back.  Hunter Hall is full of life again and even quite a bit of laughter that reminds me that learning is supposed to be fun—at least part of the time.  In the Gospel today, Jesus continues on his way to Jerusalem.  This is not merely a trip from point A to point B.  But Jesus has turned the road into a classroom.  In the Gospel today we overhear a question and answer period.  Jesus is asked how many will share in the salvation promised in the kingdom:  Are only a few to be saved?  That’s an awkward question, don’t you think?  It really goes to the heart of what Jesus has been preaching and teaching.  Over and over Jesus has taught that the kingdom is for everyone and he has embodied that truth by dining with sinners and by drinking with tax collectors.  But someone figured it all out.  There’s a problem here, in case you haven’t noticed.  How can God be all just and all merciful?  I smell a trap here.  Someone thinks that Jesus has left too much grey in a world that should be black and white, and so that one asks, “Are only a few to be saved?”    Like a good teacher, Jesus doesn’t give an easy answer.  Cryptically, he says that many who are last will be first in the kingdom of God, and many who are first will be last. Instead of numbers, Jesus gives rather a practical warning that people should strive or struggle to enter the kingdom by its “narrow door.”  Jesus leaves to God himself the answer about how many will find salvation.  He puts emphasis instead on the effort that human beings will have to exert to get in. 

 In days gone by, preachers used to favor the kind of black and white terms that Jesus avoids.  Not only did preachers know an awful lot about judgement and hell, they gave the impression that they actually ran those fiery toll booths.  With great confidence they explained that if God is just, there must be a future life to reward the just and a very comfortable place to punish the wicked. That was the general theory, but preachers went much further to explain whose little virtues deserved eternal life in the vision of God and whose vices deserved the everlasting flames of eternal remorse. 

 

This week personal writings of Mother Theresa revealed that that she endured a 50 year long crisis of faith and those who claim to know a lot about retribution are at it again. You see, on Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa went to Oslo. Dressed in her blue-bordered sari, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, she noted, “It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find and alleviate.  She reminded the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere - "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive." But a few weeks later Mother Theresa wrote to her priest and counselor: "Jesus has a very special love for you, [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear - the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds, well, more like one of us.  Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction. The preachers who run the toll booths to heaven claimed that Mother Theresa fooled us all. Wasn’t she a great impostor who preached self-abnegating love but failed the test of faith?  Imagine Mother Theresa standing before the Lord at the Narrow Gate.  I imagine the conversation would go something like this.

Jesus: Theresa, so you went to Calcutta and for 50 years you washed the wounds of dying lepers or those thrown away and abandoned to die alone.  And for 50 years, you never felt my presence or my love?

Theresa: I am sorry Lord, I felt nothing. I just did my job.

Jesus: You know, I once promised heaven to someone who gave just a cup of cold water to one such as these? Theresa, come with me.  I will show you what you did for me.

 

If Mother Theresa is an impostor, what about the rest of us?  Who among us will stand blameless on the day of judgement?  Our only hope is to be reconciled to God and we cannot be reconciled to God without meeting Jesus and standing before him in all the nakedness of who and what we were in our lives.  When we stand before Jesus at the judgement, believe me, we will see what a lie our life has been.   When we stand before Jesus, we will see the difference between what we thought we were and what we were.  We will see what God designed us to be and what we made of our selves.  And we will even see the scars of our neglect or hardness of heart upon our loved ones or upon the poor to whom we turned a callused glance.  We will see the truth because at that point that is all there is.  The truth will make us free if… we can accept it and cling to it even though it tears us to pieces.  And those souls who walk away from the truth (and I don’t care how politically incorrect this may seem), those souls who walk away from truth will be in their own hell and in hell they will remain, forever.

But we dare to believe that the same truth that could make our torment could be our joy and salvation.  For the final truth, the narrow gate, which breaks our hearts, is also the vision of divine mercy which we have disappointed.  The final truth will be not a principle, but a person full of forgiveness for all our sins and happy to have died on the cross for us, if he can turn us once more to embrace his mercy.

Fanny Crosby was born in the 19th century and she was blinded at the age of 6 weeks by a disease we could probably cure today.  Despite her blindness she wrote about 9000 hymns.  But maybe because Fanny was blind, she could see something about who was last or first in the Kingdom. In one of her hymns, Blessed Assurance, she helps us to understand what it will be like to stand before Jesus and to acknowledge our true lives and to accept his mercy.  She said:

            Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! 
            O what a foretaste of glory divine! 
            Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

    Born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.  

Amen.